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Porter signaled Nash to approach, then: “You have another daughter, don’t you, Mr. Talbot? A daughter outside your marriage?” As Porter said the words, Talbot looked away. Fischman seemed to deflate, letting out a deep breath.
Talbot glanced at Porter, then Fischman, then back to Porter again. He ran his hand through his hair. “Patricia and Carnegie know nothing about her.”
Porter stepped closer to the man. “Is she here in Chicago?”
Talbot was shaking, flustered. Again, he nodded. “Flair Tower. She has penthouse 2704 with her caregiver. I’ll call and let them know you’re coming so you’re able to get in.”
“Where’s her mother?”
“Dead. Going on twelve years now. God, she’s only fifteen …”
Nash turned his back and made a phone call to Dispatch. They could have someone at Flair Tower in a few minutes.
Porter followed Talbot back to the golf cart and sat beside him. “Who takes care of her?”
“She had cancer, her mother. I promised her I would take care of our daughter when she was gone. The tumor grew so fast; it was over in just about a month.” He tapped the side of his head. “It was right here. They couldn’t operate, though; it was too deep. I would have paid anything. I tried. But they wouldn’t operate. We must have talked to three dozen doctors. I loved her more than anything. I had to marry Patricia, I had … commitments. There were reasons beyond my control. But I wanted to marry Catrina. Sometimes life gets in the way, you know? Sometimes you have to do things for the greater good.”
Porter didn’t know. In fact, he didn’t understand. Was this the 1400s? Forced marriages were long gone. This guy needed to grow a spine. Aloud, he said, “We’re not here to judge you, Mr. Talbot. What’s her name?”
“Emory,” he said. “Emory Conners.”
“Do you have a photo?”
Talbot hesitated for a moment, then shook his head. “Not on me. I couldn’t risk Patricia finding it.”
10 (#uafa3129c-6272-5043-adf5-07e23dbb14dd)
Porter (#uafa3129c-6272-5043-adf5-07e23dbb14dd)
Day 1 • 9:23 a.m. (#uafa3129c-6272-5043-adf5-07e23dbb14dd)
“Carnegie and Emory? I’m buying this family a baby-name book for Christmas,” Nash said. “And how the hell do you hide a daughter and your girlfriend in one of the most expensive penthouses in the city without your current wife catching on?”
Porter tossed him the keys and rounded his Charger to the passenger door. “You drive; I need to keep reading this diary. There might be something helpful in it.”
“Lazy bastard, you just like to be chauffeured around. Driving Ms. Porter …”
“Fuck you.”
“I’m lighting the apple; we need to make good time.” Nash flicked a switch on the dashboard.
Porter hadn’t heard that term since he was a rookie. They used to call the magnetic police light on undercover cars apples. In today’s world they were long gone, replaced with LED light bars so slim along the window’s edge, you couldn’t see them from the inside.
Nash dropped the car into third without letting up on the gas and steered for the exit gate. The car jerked and the tires squealed with delight as power surged through them.
“I said you could drive, not play Grand Theft Auto with my wheels.” Porter frowned.
“I drive a 1988 Ford Fiesta. Do you have any idea what that’s like? The humiliation I suffer every time I climb inside and pull that squeaky door shut and fire up that monster of a four-cylinder engine? It sounds like an electric pencil sharpener. I’m a man; I need this every once in a while. Humor me.”
Porter waved him off. “We told the captain we’d call him back after we spoke to Talbot.”
Nash tugged the wheel hard to the left and raced past a minivan dutifully driving the speed limit. They drew so close, Porter spotted Angry Birds on the iPad screen of a little girl secured in the back seat. She looked up and grinned at the flashing lights, then went back to her game.
“I shot him a text back at Wheaton. He knows we’re going to Flair Tower,” Nash said.
Porter thought about the little girl with the iPad. “How do you hide a daughter for fifteen years in today’s world? It can’t be easy, right? Birth records aside, how do you keep that secret online? All the social networks? Press? Talbot’s on the news all the time, particularly since he started that new waterfront project. Cameras follow him around just waiting for him to fuck up. You’d think someone would have caught a picture or something.”
“Money can hide a lot of things,” Nash pointed out, squealing around a hard left back onto the highway.
Porter sighed and returned to the diary.
11 (#uafa3129c-6272-5043-adf5-07e23dbb14dd)
Diary (#uafa3129c-6272-5043-adf5-07e23dbb14dd)
The summers on our little piece of earth could be quite warm. By June I would find myself spending most of my time outside. Behind our house there were woods, and deep within the woods was a small lake. It froze during the winter, but during the summer its water would be the clearest blue and the most soothing temperature.
I liked to visit the lake.
I would tell Mother I was going fishing, but truth be told, I wasn’t one to fish. The idea of piercing a worm with a hook and tossing the creature into the water only to wait for something to come along and nibble at the creepy-crawly did not appeal to me. Did fish eat worms in the wild? I had my doubts. I had yet to see a worm enter the lake of its own accord. As I understood it, fish ate smaller fish, not worms. Perhaps if one were to fish with smaller fish in hopes of catching a larger one, one would be more successful? Regardless, I never had the patience for such silliness.
I did enjoy the lake, though.
So did Mrs. Carter.
I remember the first time I saw her there.
It was June 20. School had been out for seven glorious days and the sun was high in the sky, smiling down upon our little patch of earth with bright yellow love. I walked to the lake with my fishing pole in hand and the whistle of a smart tune on my lips. I was always such a happy child. Right as rain, I was.
I plopped down at my favorite tree, a large oak looming with the kind of size that can only come with age. I imagined if I sliced the tree’s belly and counted the rings, there would have been many, perhaps a hundred or more. Years came and went as the oak stood its ground and looked down upon the rest of the forest. It was a fine tree indeed.
As the summer progressed, I wore a nice little spot at the base of that tree. I always placed my fishing pole to my left and my lunch bag (containing a peanut butter and grape jam sandwich, of course) to my right. Then I would pull my latest read from my pocket and get lost within the book’s pages.
On this day, I was researching a theory. The month before in science class, we had learned that Earth was 4.5 billion years old. We’d previously learned the human race was only 200,000 years old. After I’d heard these factoids, a thought raised its hand at the back of my mind. Hence the reason I had picked up this particular book from the library the day before — a book about fossils.
You see, objects embedded in rocks are “fossilized” and stay that way for … for — I don’t know, but it’s a very long time, millions of years, in the case of dinosaurs. And most animals don’t even become fossils at all. After all, an animal would first have to get trapped in the rock to become fossilized. If the elements destroyed it before that could happen, the evidence would disappear without a trace.
The month before, I had killed a cat and laid the stiff body out at the edge of the lake to see what would happen.
Don’t worry, it wasn’t someone’s pet, only a stray cat. A little tabby that lived in the forest. At least, that is where I found it. If the animal did, in fact, belong to someone, it did not wear a tag. If it was a pet and they allowed it to roam free without a tag, any blame for the creature’s demise should fall upon the careless owners.
The cat did not look well. It hadn’t for some time.
The remains smelled something awful the first few days, but that quickly passed. First the flies came, then the maggots. Something larger may have picked at it some night during those early days. Now, though, after only a month, nothing remained but bones. Wind and rain would surely take those. Then it would be gone.
I imagine a person would disappear just as quickly.
At first the noise startled me. In all the time I had been coming to the lake, I had yet to spot another person. Nothing is forever, though, and here one stood less than a hundred feet away at the lake’s edge, gazing out over the water.
I shuffled around to the side of my tree so as not to be spotted.
Although her angle prevented me from seeing her face, I immediately recognized her hair, those long chocolate curls at her back.
She glanced in my direction and I ducked back. Then she turned to her right, surveying her surroundings. Finally content she was alone, she reached into a large bag, pulled out a towel, and spread it on the shore.
After she looked one more time in all directions, her hand went to the back of her dress and untied it at the neck. It fell from her body and pooled at her feet in a puddle of white, flowered cloth.
My mouth dropped open.
She wore nothing else.
I had never seen a naked woman before.
She closed her eyes and turned her head up to the sun and smiled.
Her legs were so long.
And breasts!
Oh my. I felt my face blush. It blushes to this day.
I saw a tiny tuft of hair at that spot, that special little spot.
Mrs. Carter walked to the water and stepped in, hesitant at first. No doubt it was cold.
She went farther still, slowly disappearing with the increasing depth.
When the water climbed above her knees, she bent down, took a handful, and splashed it over her chest. She dove in a moment later and swam toward the center of the lake.
From the safety of my tree, I watched.
• • •
The night came and went and proved to be quite restless.
With summer also came the heat, and my room became rather toasty once spring shrugged off its coat.
It wasn’t the heat that had kept me up, though; it was thoughts of Mrs. Carter. I dare to say, they were most unpure and very new to me. When I closed my eyes I still saw her standing in the lake, the water glistening on her damp flesh in the bright light. Her long legs … so long and tender. It made blood rush to a place it never had before, made me feel —
Let us say for a young boy, I was smitten.
I woke the next morning to the sound of her voice.
At first I thought it was only another dream, and I welcomed it, wishing to watch her remove her dress and walk into the lake again and again in the theater of my mind. Her voice drifted through the air on a whisper, followed by Mother’s chuckle. My eyes snapped open.
“It was kinky,” she said. “I had never been tied up before.”
“Never?” Mother replied.
Mrs. Carter giggled. “Does that make me a prude?”
“It just makes you inexperienced. In time, you’ll be surprised by what your husband can come up with to get his rocks off.”
“Really?”
“Oh yes. Just last week …” Mother’s voice dropped to a whisper.
I sat up in bed. Now the voices were faint, somewhere else in the house.
I hastily dressed and pressed my ear to my door, but still I couldn’t make out the words.
With a gentle twist of the knob, I opened the door and made my way down the hallway, my stockinged feet noiseless on the hardwood floor.
The hallway ended at the living room, which in turn faced the kitchen. I smelled something baking: the lofty aroma of apples and bread. Pie, perhaps? I love a good pie.
Mother and Mrs. Carter burst out laughing simultaneously.
I crouched low against the wall near the end of the hallway. I was still unable to hear well but dared not enter the living room. This position would have to do.
“My Simon is not that adventurous,” Mrs. Carter said. “I’m afraid to say his bag of tricks is rather light. More of a satchel than a bag, really. Or perhaps one of those little paper lunch sacks.”
The refrigerator door opened with the jingle of bottles.
“Not my husband,” Mother replied. “Sometimes I’ll put on the game just to get his mind out of the bedroom. Or the laundry room. Or the kitchen table.”
“No!” Mrs. Carter cried out with a laugh.
“Oh yes,” said Mother. “The man is like an animal in heat. Sometimes there is no stopping him.”
“But you have a kid.”
“Oh, that boy is always off doing something. When he’s not, he’s in bed sleeping like a bear in the dead of winter. The earth could open up beneath him, and he’d sleep through the carnage.”
I eased my head around the corner without so much as a sound, immediately drawing it back so as not to be seen.
Mother was mixing something at the counter. Mrs. Carter sat at the kitchen table, coffee mug at hand.
“Maybe you should try something to spice things up,” Mother continued. “Missionary is for missionaries, I always say. Introduce a toy or bring some food into the bedroom. All men like whipped cream.”
I was not permitted to bring food into my room. Not since Mother had found a half-eaten tin of cookies under my bed.
Mrs. Carter giggled again. “I could never.”
“You should.”
“But what if he doesn’t like it, or thinks I’m some kind of freak? How would I survive the embarrassment?”
“Oh, he’ll like it. They always do.”
